Hacking Product Design (eBook)

Tony Jing is a product designer at Uber Technologies Inc. Prior to that he was a product designer at Inkling Systems Inc., a startup based in San Francisco. He writes a popular blog on Medium on topics such as design, prototyping, and technology in China. 

Contents 5
About the Author 6
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction 8
Chapter 1: How Startups Work 10
Technology and Human History 10
How Do Startups Fit into This? 11
How Does Design Fit into This? 13
The Modern Startup 14
Startups Are Fickle 14
Startup Terminology 15
The Product Team 17
Product Manager 17
Product Designer 18
Project Manager and Engineering 18
Data Science, User Research, and Product Marketing 18
Summary 19
Chapter 2: Design Is a Mindset 20
Empathy 20
Egos and Assumptions 21
Listen and Observe 21
Body Language and What’s Not Said 22
Example of Lack of Empathy 22
Curiosity and an Open Mind 24
Have Virtues 25
Never Stop Learning 26
How to Solve a Problem 27
Frame, Then Reframe 27
Get to the Constraints 28
Having Goals 28
Useful, Usable, Desirable 28
Viable, Feasible, Desirable 30
The Ultimate Chart 31
Define the Product 32
Stand for Something 32
Have a Guiding Principle 32
Get Enough Details Right 33
Summary 33
Chapter 3: Practice, Tasks, and Experiences 35
A Craftsperson’s Mindset 35
Practice Makes Perfect 37
Sketching 39
Tasks and Experiences 39
Jobs to Be Done 40
Goals and Experiences 41
Summary 45
Chapter 4: Evaluating and Informing Ideas 46
Changing Times 47
Getting Ideas 48
Generating Startup Ideas 49
Painkillers vs. Vitamins vs. Candy 52
Build, Measure, Learn, and Iterate 52
A Note on Welcoming Environments 53
Research and Data 54
User Research 54
Data Science 56
Summary 56
Chapter 5: Design Is a Team Sport 57
Product Process 59
How to Work with PMs 60
Understand a PM’s Job 60
Understand Your Job 61
Handling Disagreements with Your PM 63
How to Work with Engineers 63
Understand Their Job 63
Know Some Programming 64
Get to Know Their Constraints 64
Again, Guide Them to the Users 65
Design’s Superpower 65
Everyone Will Have an Opinion 65
Summary 66
Chapter 6: Design Is About Priorities 67
There Is No “Right Time” 67
The Only Metric That Matters 69
Apply the 80/20 Rule 70
Summary 72
Chapter 7: Designing for Scale 73
Fall in Love with the Problem 74
Benefit As Many People As Possible 75
Designing for Accessibility 75
Don’t Get Lost in the Aesthetics 80
Systems and Processes 83
Systems for Designers and Engineers 86
How Do We Create a Design System? 86
When to Use and Not Use Design Systems 88
Summary 88
Chapter 8: Psychology, Culture, and Design 89
Visual Perception 90
Affordance 90
Gestalt 92
Comprehension and Memory 94
Progressive Disclosure 95
Mental Models 95
Metaphors, Examples, and Stories 96
Culture 97
Archetype 97
Design Reflects Culture 98
Summary 105
Chapter 9: Tools, Frameworks, and the Future 106
A Recap 106
Useful, Usable, Feasible, Viable, and Desirable 107
Two Goods 108
Values, 10x Better, and Details 108
Jobs to Be Done 109
Narrow and Deep 109
Build, Measure, and Learn 109
The Only Metric and 80/20 110
Space-Time Continuum 110
Cover Your Bases 112
Happy Path 113
Edge Cases and Unhappy Path 113
Audit the Product’s Touch Points 114
Communication and Critique 115
The Future 116
Carry On Designing 116
Index 117